A Breath Until Forever (9 page)

With the last drop of the whiskey gone, she took a cigarette from out of a plastic covered pack. She lit it up. She dragged in all the nicotine into her lungs as she sucked hard.
1-2-3...exhale
. Small clouds of greyish white smoke escaped from  her mouth.
Ahhhhh.
It had been a while since she smoked. Since yesterday. A day too long. But after following a few damn good shots of some damn good whiskey, this cigarette tasted better then it had ever had before and she savored in this moment recklessly.

CHAPTER FOUR

The August rain was a cool refreshing comfort against her skin. It felt like heaven was personally touching her with a gift and she showered in its love. She felt renewed..refreshed..revitalized. Her heart danced lightly and her soul broke free. She embraced every raindrop as if it was the last, tingling in delight as the rain continued to grow heavier with each oncoming raindrop. It had been awhile since she celebrated in the rain. Not since the Seattle rain in Spring of '68 when her and Daniel held hands and formed a circle out in the street, dancing in accumulated puddles and splashing about while kicking up their bare feet and laughing at how silly and childish they were. Benjamin had watched from a distance, through the fogged up rain sodden window, with a stagnant face, not wanting to participate in such a carousal jubilee. His idea of fun wasn't to dance out in the rain, but to sit in front of the TV and watch reruns of Different Strokes. One of many times that Meredith knew that her and Benjamin were so different themselves, and came from such universally diverse worlds. 

The storm clouds were full of weight and the sky was painted a pewter gray. Although the mid day painted a very gloomy picture, it was anything but as the rain seemed to wash away any kind of depression. Everything, including herself seemed to prosper in the rain. The honeysuckle that climbed up giant trellises the morning glories that seem to now awake from their slumbering naps and the orchestra of a feeding rain had quenched their thirst. There was a new awakening that stirred among the rain. The sound of the water splashing against the windy stone walkway sang like a lullaby, and the friendly mild breeze animated a revival of purpose. She watched as a stream of water came pouring down off a misaligned gutter from the roof and how it pitched onto some large rocks in front of the house. It reminded her of the water fountain in Okinawa, Japan where she visited with her husband on a vacation to visit old friends who had moved there because the one friend had received a teaching internship. It was the summer of 1965 when the Beatles were taking over America, and when the Palm Sunday Tornado outbreak happened, forty-seven tornado's hitting six unsuspecting Midwestern states, killing over 250 people. She had been really into herself then, when she thought her looks were the most important thing in her life, and she remembered when Benjamin grew angry when she wouldn't wear make up to a dinner. That was the first time that Benjamin had hit her, and the last.

CHAPTER FIVE

Meredith placed her steaming cup of coffee into cup holder of her Jeep, chewed on a leathery beef jerky and then took bites of an well too ripened apple. Love was making her hungry. She couldn't remember a time when she had eaten so much in her life. She always thought that love lost your appetite, but not with Joshua, as she noticed an increase of wanting to consume food habitually and without remorse. She looked up at the farm house that bore slats as thin as paper, a late moonlight passing through the wooden visibility, and she shook her head at the deterioration of time and how men succumb to such an unforgiving nature. She listened as a screen door banged relentlessly from the push of a small and angry wind, making a crashing noise every time it hit it.

Joshua heard the stormy wheels of a pickup whiz by. It was lately that he was hearing more noises of traffic ever since they built that god forsaken highway that had led Meredith so directly to him. He lay in bed, completely naked with a raging boner, no sheet on, and remembering that it had been a long time since he woke up with a hard on. It was because of his dreams, imagining Meredith with her pretty long hair blowing in the reckless southern wind, curling through hillsides riding  in her Jeep with it's canopy top pulled down, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, as her wheels humped back roads to foreign locations not even known by the atlas trigonometry of maps.

Joshua continued to listen to the sound of trucker wheels as they faded towards the aging Vanderbilt Bridge and the reveling of a dirty vengeance against the newly paved highway that lacerated the saturated green meadow lands. He was playing with himself now, feeling flesh in his hands harden within his gallant stroking. He envisioned her pretty face now, her darling fawning eyes and it made him come widely, splashes of his sperm to decorate his upper belly and worm through that trailing downward hair that ended in the crevices of his inner belly button. He rolled over, cleaned himself off with a well used towel, then laid back down again, waiting to hear the wheels of yet another truck but one that he had surrendered endlessly to, and that was of a 1959 Jeep that belonged to a pretty lady by the name of Meredith Hurley. Words in his mind began to seed in his thoughts, and he couldn't help but remember Shakespeare, especially his literature spires of Sonnet 18 which so eloquently preached “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short of a date.” His assimilation of it to be compared to Meredith's beauty fell somewhere between supple and sensuous, and in a half dazed state of enchantment, Joshua wondered if Meredith would be back again to make love, but he knew that she had a job to do, and that was to paint. He felt momentarily selfish, wanting her to be in his bed making love to him instead of the job that she had come out here to do, and for whatever reason, this made him feel transcendentally guilty in a way that he was becoming possessive of a woman that he had only known for a short while which appeared rather out of context for him.

Meredith parked her Jeep near, but yards away from an oversized giant oak tree with large muscular branches and fatty green leaves. She didn't want a giant bark god to interfere with her view of what she wanted to paint. From behind the seat, she took out a pair of well used hiking boots with chunky treads. She unlaced her sneakers and in replacement, pulled the boots on. With her trusty backpack packed with lots of artsy things weighing heavily over her shoulders, her easel over the other, she walked steadily down the elevated bank towards a stream that navigated towards the east with triumphant upswing. She could hear a gurgling sound as the stream bubbled over rocks of different sizes, shapes and colors. It reminded her of the steady stream that ran over by her townhouse, behind her fenced in yard, and when she gardened out there, could hear such a sound even through wooden slats of divorcement.

The stream would be perfect for what Mr. Cambria wanted. She wanted to gain some kind of compositional abstraction and take in the flowing water at the same time all the while missing the burdening highlights of dead cedar bushes that were the lurking guardians of the entrance to a cement tunnel beneath the Skylar Bridge.

The background of dogwood trees and the sky was what Mr. Cambria wanted, but that would have to be brushed on carefully with her talent of making love between light and shadows, at a later time, melding the two scenes together by using instant Kodak camera snapshots, and her crafting artistic skills.

She took out her horse hair paintbrush, a round white bristle size 11, and loaded it with the tacky texture of oil paints. She loved to work with oil, although mostly oil was messy and a beast to work with. Oil was very much like skin, and could be shaped and formed to create fleshy likenesses of whatever had been mirrored. Meredith then placed down the easel, moving the wooden legs a couple of feet to the right, acclimating it to stick into the soft earth that was inches by the stream she wanted to paint. Up close and personal always gave her good mediums to work with, and this beautiful stream was no other difference. Meredith carefully placed a canvas on the easel. Meredith practiced working around the water and knew if she grew any closer the easel would certainly fall into the stream, however she knew in order to make the painting come alive on canvas, she had to take that risk.

The color of a bursting scarlet exploded widely, brightening the sky with a red hot fire. The sun was rising upward from the horizon now, bridging this heat to decompress into a pumpkin color that had lots of undertones. Light metered out between the blankly white clouds, and the sunset adjusted to a field of maximum potential. The scenery was perfect now, and Meredith knew she had to work fast if she wanted to capture it. If she had a camera, her job would have to be done, simple, but it was her job of entrapment, even it meant a madly crazy continuum of painting brushstrokes laboring fast and furious. Meredith began to paint, a warrior of light and shadows, pushing herself to release her brushstrokes in such a fury that each bristle of each horse hair danced along the canvas in a frenzy of creation.

Just then, something unusual caught her eye. She took out a pair of binoculars from her backpack and peered through the circular magnifying lenses. “What the hell?” She asked herself, strangely curious. What she saw really surprised her.  From a distance, was a buck. A buck with the biggest and thickest antlers that she had ever seen. It had a twelve point antler chandelier of bone and warrior form. He was a handsome deer, of both masculinity and courage. She couldn't help but think the buck was very much like Joshua Aspen, and it made her smile. 

But the buck was in the way of her most perfect view. “Shoo!” Meredith tried waving it away. She made a noise with her paintbrush, drumming it hard against her easel. The noise scared the buck off, and the buck went back running into the wild closed meadows from which he originally came. 

Meredith ran up the bank. The sun was fast approaching her from behind. She headed back towards the bank, the sun being at 70 percent now, and it was coming along to its full maximum capacity. She had to paint now, right then and there, or all would be lost. She had no insurance that the sun wouldn't ruin all that she had worked so hard for.

Breathing hard from the sprint, stuttering breaths escaped from her exasperated chest. She panted, but then she repeated the entire process, looking for just the right angle, the right view. She locked into the canvas, moving closer and closer to the subject matter of the landscape that she wanted to paint, wading upstream as she adjusted to the direction of the light, and the various hues of the near ending day. She looked vertically, and recomposed herself within a sequence of vocational composition. It was something in her movements that she was efficient with, that made her capture the light with such a specialized way.

Meredith Hurley understood the light. She understood it more than the sun from which the light was provided, and was most familiar what continuous exposure time had, when incorporating light to paint the beautiful landscapes from which her paint brush had become accustomed to. To her, light wasn't just something to paint, it was much more than that. Light showed movement, energy, and steadied itself in the transient collaboration between love and the universe which was absolutely incredible.

She headed back down the road she had come along before. It was at least twenty minutes to the closest edge of the most northeast of town and she might just have one more painting in her if she hurried along.

As she drove, dust flew off the back tires, her cigarette was lit with the dancing flame of the devil, Jeep bounced mercilessly off of gravel, past Joshua's ranch where she saw no sign of him. She didn't know what she expected. He was single, and probably at work working his butt off making a few dollars an hour he had his hands full working full time at the ranch and full time at his job. She knew he worked so why even check that he was there? If she had only known that he had taken the day off, due to complications of the heart. She didn't need him in her life. She didn't want anything more entangled in the involvement of complexities. She had had a nice evening with a great guy but she would leave it at that. She had to leave him alone. God, he's handsome as the devil though, and treated her nice. There was something about Joshua that made her feel so alive, so vividly insatiable. She couldn't keep her eyes off of him from the first moment she had laid her eyes on him. He was hot as hell, rough, scruffy, and had the eyes of the ocean at its most stormiest. If lust could be a manifestation, it manifested in Joshua Aspen.

Joshua was in the barn taking care of the cattle when Meredith had accelerated her Jeep wildly past his place. Noise from her Jeep had rattled the longhorn stock and they had stirred uncontrollably, kicking and carrying about; rattled by such a disturbing bewailing of mechanical growling. Joshua had peeked out for a brief second, and had seen Meredith by afar, but had shied away back inside, retreating, knowing it's best he hide out. He couldn't have feelings for a married woman, he just couldn't! Most of all, he didn't want that kind of trouble. He had been in too much trouble as it was, with the past drug use, and the heartache of Adrienne which brought him to drink too much whiskey and get into too many fist fights down at Kiley's Irish Pub in town. For awhile now, and a long time for him, he had stayed away from trouble, and he wanted to keep it that way. But there was something about Meredith that made him want to get back into trouble. And that's when he had remembered about the note he had forgotten. Perhaps she had found it, even though he had placed it in a place he didn't want her to find, buried away underneath old paintbrushes, and dried up rags, and that's probably why she was driving by and he had totally ignored her arrival. He had invited her, sure, however, his subconsciousness and his deep knowing that it probably wasn't the best thing that he could do, hid it in her backpack like a lost treasure, hoping that perhaps destiny would lead her right to it, in which it did.